Tag: Personalisation and Escaping the Filter Bubble: The Iron Cage in Binary Code

In a recent paper, I’ve argued we find a cultural project underpinning ‘big data’: a commitment to reducing human being, in all its embodied affective complexity, stripping it of any reality beyond the behavioural traces which register through digital infrastructure. Underlying method, methodology and theory there is a vision of how human beings are constituted, as well as how they can be influenced. In some cases, this is explicitly argued but it is often simply implicit, lurking beneath the surface of careful choices which nonetheless exceed their own stated criteria.

It’s an argument I’m keen to take further than I have at present and reading Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner by Katrine Marçal has left me interested in exploring the parallels between homo economicus (and why we are invested in him) and the emerging homo digitalis. Marçal writes on pg 162 of the allure of the former, misunderstood if we see it as nothing more than an implausible theoretical construct or a mechanism to exercise influence over political decision-making:

Many have criticized economic man’s one-dimensional perspective. He lacks depth, emotions, psychology and complexity, we think. He’s a simple, selfish calculator. A caricature. Why do we keep dragging this paper doll around? It’s ridiculous. What does he have to do with us? But his critics are missing something essential. He isn’t like us, but he clearly has emotions, depth, fears and dreams that we can completely identify with. Economic man can’t just be a simple paper doll, a run-of-the-mill psychopath or a random hallucination. Why, if he were, would we be so enchanted? Why would we so desperately try to align every part of existence with his view of the world, even though collected research shows that this model of human behaviour doesn’t cohere with reality? The desperation with which we want to align all parts of our lives with the fantasy says something about who we are. And what we are afraid of. This is what we have a hard time admitting to ourselves. Economic man’s parodically simple behaviour doesn’t mean that he isn’t conjured from deep inner conflicts

What makes homo economicus so compelling? This allure has its roots in a denial of human dependence, describing on pg 155 how our fascination with “his self-sufficiency, his reason and the predictable universe that he inhabits” reflect discomfort with our once having been utterly dependent on others, “at the mercy of their hopes, demands, love, neuroses, traumas, disappointments and unrealized lives”, as well as the inevitability that we will be so again at the other end of the life-course. But he also embodies a vision of what life should be like between the two poles of dependency, as she writes on pg 163:

His identity is said to be completely independent of other people. No man is an island, we say, and think that economic man’s total self-sufficiency is laughable. But then we haven’t understood his nature. You can’t construct a human identity except in relation to others. And whether economic man likes it or not –this applies to him as well. Because competition is central to his nature, his is an identity that is totally dependent on other people. Economic man is very much bound to others. But bound to them in a new way. Bound to them. Downright chained to them. In competition. If economic man doesn’t compete, he is nothing, and to compete he needs other people. He doesn’t live in a world without relationships. He lives in a world where all relationships are reduced to competition. He is aggressive and narcissistic. And he lives in conflict with himself. With nature and with other people. He thinks that conflict is the only thing that creates movement. Movement without risk. This is his life: filled with trials, tribulations and intense longing. He is a man on the run.

If I’m right about the existence of homo digitalis, a clear vision of human constitution underpinning ‘big data’*, we can ask similar questions about this truncated, eviscerated, predictable monad. So complex when we look up close, so simple when we gaze down from on high. Our individuality melts away in the aggregate, leaving us no longer overwhelming but simply overwhelmed. Manageable, knowable, stripped back. Why might this be an appealing vision of human kind? Who might it be appealing to? I’m sure many can guess where I’m going with this, but it’s a topic for another post.

*A term I use to encompass digital social science, commercial and academic, as well as the organisations and infrastructures which it facilitates.

In the last couple of months, I’ve found myself reflecting on irritation. What is it? It’s one of our most recognisable reactions to the world, yet it’s hard to be precise about what it is. Is it an emotion? Is it a state of mind? Is it a reaction to the world? This is the definition which Wikipedia offers:

There’s a whole model of the person implicit within this which I’m sceptical of. The idea that mental states manifests themselves in effects with implications for cognition, generated by propensities and generating emotions. It’s an individualised account, even if a multifaceted one, concerning something that’s deeply relational.

The most straight forward definition of irritation would be ‘something which irritates’. In one sense it’s circular, telling us nothing about what irritation is, but it captures the relationality of the reaction. We are irritated by something. We find something irritating. It involves an evaluative relation to the world, but one which, as it were, goes wrong. Far from the smoothly hermeneutic world of the post-Aristotelian philosophers, we have the Goffmanian reality of living together (in a world which frustrates our purposes).

So if irritation is being irritated by something, what is it to be irritated? To be “angered,provoked,orannoyed” or “inflamed or made raw, asa part ofthe body”. The second definition concerns the resolutely physical but I think it captures something important. We are irritated when we are inflamed by the world, made raw by its recalcitrance. People or circumstances irritates us when they impede our routine movement through the world. Things are not as we expect. We’re forced to calibrate ourselves in relation to the world, pushed back into ourselves confronted with a world that resists us, rather than easily making or way through it.

We get irritated by others when they do not act as we expect them to. We get irritated by others when they do not act as we think they ought to. In this sense, I would argue that irritation tracks declining social integration: the less agreement there is about how we ought to comport ourselves, the more likely we are to experience irritation in daily life.

What interests me is how we respond to this. If we simply make internal allowances for the fact that others may have different expectations and aspirations to ourselves, it’s easy for the irritation to dissipate. A trivial example: I find it irritating when people talk loudly in the steam room at my gym. But I also recognise that some people go there to socialise, whereas for me it’s a resolutely individual activity. Reminding myself of that fact usually leads the irritation to subside.

On the other hand, if I seek external confirmation for my reaction, it’s unlikely to subside. This is where social media comes in: the imagined interlocutor (what Danny Miller calls the ‘meta best friend’) can serve as a outlet, without the possibility for censure that arises when you share with a concrete individual who’s liable to tell you to stop obsessing and let other people be. It’s even more effective when an agent of this imagined interlocutor, someone who emerges from the background to respond definitively before fading back into it and propping up an imagined consensus, confirms that they too find this behaviour irritating.

Sharing irritation through social networks can facilitate an extreme form of what critical realists call communicative reflexivity. We find confirmation of our immediate reactions in others, rather than further interrogating our reaction internally, leading to a hardening of our reaction and a disposition to act similarly in future. I don’t think digital technology straight forwardly causes a decline in social integration but I do think social networks can amplify personal reactions which entrench the decline by, as it were, depleting the reserves of tolerance we have for others who think about and approach life in a different way to us. This is connected to the paradox of incivilityand it’s something I’d like to come back to in greater depth.

A few weeks ago, I found myself on a late night train to Manchester from London. After a long day, I was longing to arrive home, a prospect that seemed imminent as the train approached Stockport. Then it stopped. Eventually, we were told that there was someone on the tracks ahead and that the police were on the scene. We waited. After another ten minutes, we were told that the police were still trying to apprehend the person on the tracks. I checked Twitter and saw this incident had been unfolding for a while, seemingly disrupting all the trains going into and through Stockport train station. We waited some more. The train manager announced that the police had told trains they could proceed… a few minutes later the finally moving train came to an abrupt halt, apparently because the person who, it turned out was still on the tracks, had almost been hit. The train staff seemed surprised and mildly shaken up, unable to explain why the police had given the order to move.

I eventually made it to Manchester, albeit after the last tram to the north had departed. As a naturally curious person, I wanted to find out more about what had happened, not least of all to clarify the slightly weird Benny Hill-esque images I was left with following these repeated invocations of police “in pursuit of” this mysterious “woman on the tracks” over half an hour. Plus what the hell were the police doing telling the train to proceed when she was still on the tracks? If it was a mistake, I was curious about why exactly they thought their pursuit had ended when they hadn’t arrested her. If it wasn’t a mistake, it seemed an inexcusable and possibly illegal action, both in terms of harm to the woman and the psychological violence potentially inflicted on a train driver.

But I couldn’t find anything. I searched local newspapers but nothing. I searched social media but could only find my own tweet and the blandly descriptive disruption update on national rail enquiries. My point in recounting this story is not to stress the intrinsic interest of the situation itself. It’s not particularly interesting and you likely had to be there to have any concern. Rather, I’m interested in understanding the character of my frustration at being unable to find what I was looking for through digital means. It’s something I thought back to yesterday, when I was looking for a particular clip from the Simpsons to make a point in a conversation I was having with someone, but could not find it no matter how hard I looked.

In both cases, my behaviour revealed an implicit expectation concerning the extent of digitalisation. In the first case, that an incident which presumably delayed hundreds of people under (vaguely) mysterious circumstances would inevitably generate some digital record. In the second case, a memorable incident from a popular tv show would surely have been uploaded to a video sharing site. My frustration, though mild, stems from an encounter with the incompleteness of digitalisation.

These thoughts are extremely provisional but I’d really welcome feedback.

Another really provocative idea from Rethinking Social Exclusion by Simon Winlow and Steve Hall. From pg 126:

This supposedly ethical process of distancing oneself from vulgar commercialism is a variant of self-exclusion from the social; like it or not, these non-places come closest to representing the actuality of contemporary British life. There is no more ‘reality’ or ‘authenticity’ to be found in the charity shop or the ethnic café than in a branch of Tesco or Starbucks. Capitalism is not threatened by our desire to buy fair trade coffee or locally sourced fruit and vegetables. In fact these new niche markets are exactly what contemporary capitalism needs to present itself as heterogeneous and democratic, the principal ideological strategy that ensures its acceptability, continuity and growth by maintaining the practical allegiance of those who still credit themselves as having values over and above it.

I’d add a further question to this: what are the temporal preconditions for this activity? How much time, energy and knowledge are required in order to identify these opportunities for self-exclusion and to act on them?

Yesterday I walked to the supermarket, like I do every Tuesday morning. All of a sudden I started noticing a few people starting to follow me. I try to convince myself that it is probably just my imagination, and carry on walking. After a few minutes, I cross the road and make another turn, but then I look behind me and see that now there are dozens of people starting to follow me, taking pictures of me and writing rapidly, documenting my every move. After a couple more steps, they became hundreds. My heart was racing, I could hardly breathe, and I started to panic. Freaking out, I shouted at them, “Who are you? What do you want from me?” I tried to get a clearer view of this huge group – some looked a bit familiar but I didn’t remember where I’d seen them before. They shouted back at me, “Don’t worry, we don’t really know who you are, we just need some information on you, so we can show you different ads on billboards”. Puzzled by their response I scream, “What do you mean you don’t know who I am!? You know my gender, skin/eyes/hair color, height, weight, where I live, the clothes and glasses I wear, that I have 10 piercing in one ear and that I shop at Sainsbury on Tuesday mornings!” They smile and try to reassure me, “But we don’t know your NAME, silly! So stop being so paranoid, we do this to everyone walking on the street, it’s public space you know…”.

This scenario might seem science fiction to some people, a dystopian reality, horror film or a South Park episode. But for the others that recognise this situation, this is actually what happens every day when you browse the internet.

Any suggestions about where I can find syllabi for digital hygiene courses in schools would be much appreciated. I’m also curious about how advocates of ‘digital hygiene’ see its relationship to the notion of a ‘digital footprint’: is the former what we must do in order to mitigate the damage potentially created by the latter?

From Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, pg 57. This isn’t necessarily the case but it’s a claim that holds true in the absence of personal tech skills and a disposition to exercise then:

The paradox is that, the more the small item (smartphone or iPod) I hold in my hand is personalized, easy to use, ‘transparent’ in its functioning, the more the entire set-up has to rely on the work being done elsewhere, in a vast circuit of machines which coordinate the user’s experience. The more our experience is non-alienated, spontaneous, transparent, the more it is regulated and controlled by the invisible network of state agencies and large private companies that follow their secret agendas.

I knew data brokerage was big but I didn’t realise it was this big. From The Data Revolution by Rob Kitchin, loc 1039:

Epsilon is reputed to own data on 300 million company loyalty card members worldwide, with a databank holding data related to 250 million consumers in the United States alone (Edwards 2013). Acxiom is reputed to have constructed a databank concerning 500 million active consumers worldwide (about 190 million individuals and 126 million households in the United States), with about 1,500 data points per person, its servers processing over 50 trillion data transactions a year, and its turnover exceeding one billion dollars (Singer 2012a). It also manages separate customer databases for, or works with, 47 of the Fortune 100 companies (Singer 2012a). Datalogix claim to store data relating to over a trillion dollars’ worth of offline purchases (Edwards 2013). Other data broker and analysis companies include Alliance Data Systems, eBureau, ChoicePoint, Corelogic, Equifax, Experian, ID Analytics, Infogroup, Innovis, Intelius, Recorded Future, Seisint and TransUnion.

A lovely passage from Lisa Gitelman at Loc 78 of her edited collection “Raw Data” Is An Oxymoron aboutthe difficulty of going ‘off grid’ when the utilities of daily life leave us bound into the digital cage:

Try to spend a day “off the grid” and you’d better leave your credit and debit cards, transit pass, school or work ID, passport, and cell phone at home—basically, anything with a barcode, magnetic strip, RFID, or GPS receiver.

Routinely, businesses now ask shadow-working customers to cough up personal information as a way to smooth transactions, or even enable them to buy things at all. To make online purchases, customers open accounts with bookstores, banks, newspapers, utilities, sports teams, apparel vendors, phone service providers, and so on. Everyone wants you to open an account. This means supplying contact and demographic data and then having all transactions tracked, building a personal profile for the vendor. That profile enables vendors to activate “recommendation engines.” Once its algorithms have examined your past purchases, Amazon can recommend books or desk lamps you might like, and Netflix can suggest movies to rent. On my computer, opening Amazon.com brings up thumbnails of books by Bill Bryson, an author whose works I have purchased, and books on pharmaceutical companies, a topic I’ve browsed.

In their Being Digital Citizens, Evelyn Ruppert and Engin Isin outline a theory of conventions on pg 25-26:

We shall characterize conventions broadly as sociotechnical arrangements that embody norms, values, affects, laws, ideologies, and technologies. As sociotechnical arrangements, conventions involve agreement or even consent—either deliberate or often implicit—that constitutes the logic of any custom, institution, opinion, ritual, and indeed law or embodies any accepted conduct. Since both the logic and embodiment of conventions are objects of agreement, performing these conventions also produces disagreement. Another way of saying this is that the performativity of conduct such as making rights claims often exceeds conventions. As Zivi writes, ‘[A]nalyzing [citizenship] from a performative perspective means, then, appreciating the extent to which our claims both reference and reiterate social conventions, and yet have forces and effects that exceed them.’

As I understand their point, the reproduction of a convention is a function of agreement. It represents ‘accepted conduct’ as inflected through the particular arrangement of social and technical parts which they build into their understanding of a convention. But surely there are many conventions we acquiesce to for entirely prudential reasons, without in any substantive sense ‘accepting’ them? Aren’t there also authoritative conventions with declining efficacy, as can be seen by anyone who tries to walk up/down escalators at Euston tube station on a regular basis?

I don’t think Ruppert and Isin would deny this. But I think building agreement into the definition of consensus precludes a grasp on the dynamics through which conventions are reproduced or transformed. To understand this as agreement intrinsic to the convention which produces disagreement extrinsic to it, leaves it a mystery as to the conditions under which the former can be influenced by the latter: if we accept that conventions are born, change and die then we need to conceptualise conventions in a way that can link particular performances to the life cycle of conventions. I don’t think we can do this unless we recognise the variable orientations of subjects to conventions as something within the reproduction or transformation of the convention itself.

This matters to my new project because I really like this socio-technical framing of conventions. Getting this right seems crucial to moving beyond affirmations of the vast expansion of social and cultural opportunities available to subjects in order to gain traction on why some subjects flourish under these circumstances and others do not. Conventions are a crucial mediating factor, particularly in terms of how opportunities are opened up and closed down for particular subjects on specific platforms.

Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s 32-year-old director of product for news feed, is Alison’s less technical counterpart—a “fuzzie” rather than a “techie,” in Silicon Valley parlance. He traffics in problems and generalities, where Alison deals in solutions and specifics. He’s the news feed’s resident philosopher.

The push to humanize the news feed’s inputs and outputs began under Mosseri’s predecessor, Will Cathcart. (I wrote about several of those innovations here.) Cathcart started by gathering more subtle forms of behavioral data: not just whether someone clicked, but how long he spent reading a story once he clicked on it; not just whether he liked it, but whether he liked it before or after reading. For instance: Liking a post before you’ve read it, Facebook learned, corresponds much more weakly to your actual sentiment than liking it afterward.

After taking the reins in late 2013, Mosseri’s big initiative was to set up what Facebook calls its “feed quality panel.” It began in summer 2014 as a group of several hundred people in Knoxville whom the company paid to come in to an office every day and provide continual, detailed feedback on what they saw in their news feeds. (Their location was, Facebook says, a “historical accident” that grew out of a pilot project in which the company partnered with an unnamed third-party subcontractor.) Mosseri and his team didn’t just study their behavior. They also asked them questions to try to get at why they liked or didn’t like a given post, how much they liked it, and what they would have preferred to see instead. “They actually write a little paragraph about every story in their news feed,” notes Greg Marra, product manager for the news feed ranking team. (This is the group that’s becoming Facebook’s equivalent of Nielsen families.)

“The question was, ‘What might we be missing?’ ” Mosseri says. “‘Do we have any blind spots?’” For instance, he adds, “We know there are some things you see in your feed that you loved and you were excited about, but you didn’t actually interact with.” Without a way to measure that, the algorithm would devalue such posts in favor of others that lend themselves more naturally to likes and clicks. But what signal could Facebook use to capture that information?

Radicalization and Media Logic:
Surveillances and Self-Mediatization in Social Media and Politics

A special issue of Medijske studije/ Media Studies Journal
to be published in Vol. 8, issue 15 (June 2017)
edited by
Dr Robert Imre, University of Newcastle, Australia and University of Tampere, Finland
Dr Stephen Owen, University of New South Wales, Australia

About the issue

The current state of usage of social media platforms and various types of communication tools gives us a new form of political expression at all levels. Pressed to mediatize themselves, political actors of all kinds—protestors, official political/party representatives, individual issue-drivers, and political participants—are all increasingly driven to involve themselves in complex processes of self-mediatization. The corollary of this increase in self- mediatization is a deepening engagement with the surveillance assemblage through what is often experienced (or presented to users) as mundane aspects of social-surveillance. The posting of material to, or consumption of content on social media communications makes constant interaction with the platforms de rigueur—and often compulsive—and ensures that levels of monitoring are continuing to press for these political actors to self-mediatize and monitor each others social media status and content.

The standardised architectures and designs of these social media platforms, as well as the various discourses pertaining to the correct uses of them, encourage particular presentations of self and content. As a new form of political participation these social media platforms guarantee a privileging of specific and particular kinds of persona constructs that inhibit politics at one level, while developing an ever-expanding surveillance at another level. As the surveillance assemblage becomes more entrenched the surveillance gaze upon the users of social media platforms is also more apparent. This universal surveillance assemblage perpetually adds layers of content to the social media ensemble, and creates a politics that can no longer exist, by definition, outside of the surveilled social media framing. This creates the illusion of universal participation while at the same time constricting political dialogue as the civilizing and restraining effects of the social media spotlight are brought to bear on each participant using these platforms. Given these constraints, this

special issue seeks papers dealing with some of the affects/effects when dealing with the phenomenon of radicalization.

Media Studies is an interdisciplinary journal published by the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Political Science. The journal provides an international forum for the presentation of research and the advancement of discourse concerning media, communications, journalism, and public relations, within each field’s cultural, historical, political and/or economic contexts.

The articles should not be published before (neither partially nor completely), nor currently be considered for publication by any other journal or book, nor should the submissions be a translation of previously published articles.
The journal is indexed in the SCOPUS and ERIH Plus databases.

Submission guidelines: Please send your abstract (500 – 700 words) and a short CV with contact information, to the guest editor and please make sure that it addresses the theoretical framework, method and (preliminary) conclusions. The deadline for abstracts is 1 December 2015 and authors will be notified by 20 December 2015.

The deadline for full articles is 1 May 2016.

Upon acceptance, manuscripts shall undergo a rigorous international double-blind peer review. Manuscripts should be written in English, using Times New Roman; size 12; 1.5 line spacing; all pages should be numbered appropriately. The main text of the article should be between 5,000 and 6,000 words (for more see Notes for authors at http://www.mediastudies.fpzg.hr).

I’m reading Untangling the Web, by Aleks Krotoski, as an accessible precursor to beginning to engage with the social psychological literature on online behaviour. It’s proving to be an enjoyable read so far, though maybe not quite as much of a pop social psychology book as I had hoped it would be. It’s more of a collection of thoughtful tech journalism than anything else. But I just came across a good example of what I was initially looking for: different (mutually compatible) social psychological explanations for why people are so blasé about their data. From page 133-134:

There are indeed a few things that are psychologically unique about interacting via machines. First, we don’t expect consequences. The web feels ephemeral, separate from so- called real life. What happens online stays online. That’s totally untrue, of course. As we continue to intertwine our lives with technology, our virtual and physical selves evolve into the same beast, and therefore it’s impossible to separate the consequences that affect one from the other. Something said or done in one place can easily be taken out of context and dropped into another. Ask the many people who’ve been fired from their jobs for posting party pictures on their Facebook timelines.

Second, according to the Ohio study, online we experience an extreme version of the so- called “third person effect”: we rationalise, through our infernal, eternal human nature, that if something’s going to go wrong, it’ll happen to the other guy. So we won’t change our privacy settings on a social network or turn off cookies on our browsers to keep the details of our surfing away from advertisers: only when we experience a personal violation will we be more careful to protect ourselves and our information.

Third, we’re unable to imagine the vastness of the potential audience we communicate with when we’re online, so we treat the computer like a confidant, a confessor. We have an intimate relationship with our computer terminals; our laptops, mobile phones, desktops and tablets feel private, and the networks we hang out in feel closed. In order to make a connection with others, we feel it’s OK to share private information. “We think the web is a kind of conversation,” explains Dr Kieran O’Hara, a philosopher and web scientist at the University of Southampton. “It feels a bit like writing letters, a bit like a telephone conversation. But it’s all that and much more.”

As I wrote earlier in this book, if you stick “Aleks Krotoski” into an online search engine, you’ll be able to learn a lot about me. Along with basic biographical details such as where I was born and who my parents are, you can find out where I’ve worked, where I’ve lived, who I hang out with, who I’m close to, that I have a cat (and what his name is), what I like to do at the weekends, what kinds of food I like, and my email address and mobile phone number. Although in social network profiles I tend to hide behind an old close- up of a shock of pink hair (I dyed it until 2009), you’ll easily find what I look like from the snapshots that I and others have taken and uploaded, dating mostly from the last ten years but also from college and high school. With a little more digging, you’ll be able to figure out who’s in my extended family and what they do, where they live and what they’re interested in. You can easily find my home address. You might be able to get a sense of my routine – when I’m in my house and when I’m out. You’ll probably know when I’m on work trips. You might be able to pick up on which running routes are my favourites, and on which days and at what times I tend to follow those paths. It would, frankly, be easy to find me, if you were so inclined. Please don’t. But you can. In fact, if someone I didn’t know wanted to gain my trust, it’d be pretty easy to find out all this personal information and then spin it into a yarn. They might be online scammers who are trying to exploit me. They might be commercial services that want me to feel an emotional attachment to their brand. And that’s just using the information that we put out there ourselves.

Seeking to engender this same compelling sense of efficacy, secondary “bonus games” on video slots invite gamblers to perform actions over which they seem to have control (but do not). Anchor Gaming’s 2000 game Strike It Rich, for instance, presented players with a bonus game in which the object was to guide the trajectory of a bowling ball on a screen using a tracking device. Although the device enabled players to lift the bowling ball on the video screen, aim it, and roll it toward the virtual pins, the RNG determined where the ball would land long before its simulated roll came to an end. IGT’s race- car- themed bonus game similarly let players move a race car with a joystick, lending them a false sense of influence over the car’s movement. The point of such games is to give players “the feeling that they control the outcome of the event,” as a company product profile indicated in 2000. 36 Although one might assume that such a feeling would be disenchanting rather than enchanting, in fact it gives gamblers a sense that they are able to “animate” the gambling machine and thereby exert a sort of magical efficacy over its determinations of chance— which, at the same time, remain obscure and mysterious to them.

An obvious place to start is with what I take ‘images of the human’ to be and what I take ‘digital social science’ to be. Images of the human are fairly straight forward. I mean everything from the most explicit claims about human properties and powers to implicit assumptions that go unrecognised by those who can be claimed to hold them.

What do I mean by digital social science? There is digital social science being conducted within the boundaries of the academy, both in terms of an explicit tendency towards a digital focus (digital sociology, digital geography, digital anthropology and the digital humanities) and that which is digital in its methods and/or objects but does not designate itself as such. There are also newer entrants to the intellectual scene, such as the computational social sciences and data science, often though by no means always being lead by physicists and mathematicians seeking to understand the social as a complex system, fundamentally no different to any other found in the natural world. Crucially, much digital social science takes place outside the academy and it is through this that the images of the human explicit or implicit within it can exercise an influence upon the world (and the humans) which they represent.

One of the most provocative offerings comes in Dataclysm, a book by Christian Rudder, a mathematician by training who co-founded the popular online dating site OkCupid. Now with one million to thirty million users, depending on how one defines the level of activity that constitutes a ‘user’, it is the 425th highest ranked site on the internet. The subtitle of Dataclysm is Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) and this captures the impulse of the book: as Rudder puts it, “instead of asking people survey questions or contribing small-scale experiments, which was how social science was often done in the past, I can actually go and look at what actually happens when, say, 100,000 white men and 100,000 black women interact in private” (loc 63). The new technological possibilities offered by transactional data are seen to both call into question ‘who we are’ and offer us ways of looking behind this veil to the underlying reality.

In this sense, I think we misunderstand such an approach if we describe it simply as empiricism. There’s a critical theory here, implicitly claiming to disrupt what Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor call “our ordinary pre-critical view of ourselves and the world”. The impulse here is to reveal the reality of human behaviour at scale: theconditionsof both our everyday and scientific knowledge claims are implicitly understood to offer only a limited perspective on what it is humans actually do. Through the data we can reveal what they really do, as opposed to what they tell social surveys and interviewers they do. The reality of behaviour can be read from the numbers: ‘let the data speak for themselves”, at least if we are talking about the right kind of data. I’m at a very early stage of this work and I don’t want to impose a uniformity on the objects of my (meta)-critique, but I’ve chosen Rudder’s example because it’s the most explicit articulation of something which I believe is much more pervasive: an image of the human in which reflection and articulation are seen as mere forth, concealing the reality of what lies beneath.

Mark Andrejevic does a superb job in his book InfoGlut of unpicking the variety of ways in which those beholden to this image struggle with the “recalcitrant mind” which disguises the reality of who we are and why we do what we do. Interiority is rendered as a problem, one struggled with through the identification of ever more diverse proxies and ever more sophisticated measuring instruments, but one which continually returns as a frustrating opacity that eludes conceptualisation. It’s hard to make sense of what is being studied if we deny reflexivity: why did people choose OkCupid other competing sites, why are they using online dating rather than other alternatives, why are some demographics so over-represented amongst those who use online data and others aren’t? Each of these questions can be met by ad-hoc hypotheses, propping up the assumed transparency of the self but doing so provides us with a truncated and flattened social world, devoid of reflexivity. Reasons for action are tacitly acknowledged but representations of those reasons is deemed methodologically illicit: the real things people do (and as a corollary the real reasons) are in fact the focus of inquiry but to seek to represent these leaves us tangled up in the thickets of representation that the project of the transparent self is trying so hard to avoid.

What fascinates me is the reflexivity of those so committed to denying reflexivity. Why do they choose these topics? Why do they write these papers? Why do they talk at these conferences? Their trajectories of social action become inexplicable without reference to precisely the human capacity which their intellectual projects so thoroughly empty out from the social world. We need what Nick Couldry calls a hermeneutic of the anti-hermenutic: what drives this impulse towards the dissolution of reasons and evaluations? How does it differ from and what does it share with similar projects to be found in postmodernism and behavioural science? Or indeed in something like phrenology, as Mark Andrejevic, Dan McQuillan and others have suggested. This investigation will be philosophical, recovering the implicit images of the human and engaging with the explicit ones, but it will also be sociological: looking at the designers, engineers and managers and data scientists and the intra-organisational and inter-organisation contexts within which they are embedded, as well as how digital capitalism as a whole is taking shape through their activity.

These questions matter at a political, as well as philosophical level, because as the legal theorist Frank Pasquale suggests, the causal power of the algorithms that now govern the dynamics of reputation and visibility increasingly lead to calls for us to self-reflect in these terms in order to negotiate a social world governed through them: leading to what Pasquale describes as an “algorithmic self”. But crucially the operation of the algorithms remains opaque, subject to review and revision in a way that is always stubbornly outside our purview. Pasquale cites the example of “the self-promoter whose status updates on Facebook or LinkedIn gradually tip from informative to annoying” or “the search engine−optimizing website whose tactics become a bit too aggressive, thereby causing it to run afoul of Google’s web spam team and consequently sink into obscurity”.

This isn’t a case of people being moulded into a new shape by technology, such that we eventually become what the algorithm assumes that we already are. Reflexivity doesn’t go away. In fact it becomes more imperative than ever, but the risk is that it’s a new form of reflexivity, anticipatory in its focus but orientated towards ubiqutuous algorithmic evaluation rather than our own projects and passions. A communicative reflexivity disciplined by the algorithmic environment rather than the evaluations of trusted interlocutors within a secure micro-context.

This is a peculiar kind of hyper reflexivity which becomes necessary under circumstances that are at least for now isolated within particular tracts of daily life for most (e.g. social media use): a hyper reflexivity which ensues when people are “constantly assessing how each word or deed will affect permanent reputational profiles”. Under such conditions, reflexivity becomes a matter of modulation, adjusting to a context within which the rules are both given and yet fluctuating. Crucially, as Pasquale observes, “we all sense that certain activities win the approval of assorted watchers and others do not”. Measurement is not new by any means but what’s new is its ubiquity, driven it should be noted by near entirely commerical concerns, facilitated by the sheer efficiency with which this is possible when digitally mediated action generates transactional data subject to scruinty.

Pasquale invokes the novel Super Sad True Love Story in which credit scores from 400 to 1600 are displayed publically on ‘credit poles’ at shops and on the streets, ‘personality’ and ‘sexiness’ are automatically ranked within any social space and ‘mood + stress indicators’ provide public heirarchical rankings within any work places. There are similar themes explored in The Circle by Dave Eggars, as well as Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer. This increasingly rich vein of fiction, beginning to find parallel representation in television, reflects an incipient unease about the place of measurement within social life. As Pasquale describes Super Sad True Love Story, “In an anomic world where social mores are adrift, the characters in the novel scramble to ‘find their place’ in the social pecking order by desperately comparing themselves with each other”. It seems to me that this could equally be a description of digital capitalism in late 2015. The ‘near future’ world these novels explore seems very near indeed.

The risk here is that the a-reflexive human subject becomes something close to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reflexivity is not dissolved but truncated, restricted in its scope to orientating oneself within hierarchies that become axiomatic: a metric driven neo-traditionalism in which even the most reflexive projects go no further than creative projects of self-optimization through the quantified self? When considered at the level of law and politics, we can see how reflexivity itself can become an object of suspicion in a way likely to become ever more common.

Predictive analytics function by inferring from past behaviour, licensing interventions in concrete fields (policing, education, health care) based on parameters of ‘normal behaviour’ elaborated in a profoundly opaque way: one’s own past behaviour is the most knowable thing about these emerging standards and retreat into what we know we have done in the past is likely to become a safety zone, sought in order to avoid what Kate Crawford has called ‘predictive privacy harms’. Elsewhere she identifies what might be a forbearer of the coming conservatism in the tendency towards ‘norm core’: a style of dress that celebrates bland ubiquity, an aesthetic affirmation of the value of not standing out in any way whatsoever. Predictive privacy harms are by their nature unpredictable and, which is worse, we’re often unlikely to realise we have been harmed in this way. As Frank Pasquale writes, “we risk freezing into place a future that rigidly reenacts the past, as individuals find that replicating the captured patterns of past behavior is the only safe way to avoid future suspicion, stigma, and disadvantage.” We retain our reflexivity but become something less than human, enthusiastically objectifying ourselves – in a paradoxically reflexive way – while becoming objects to which things happen in wider social life.

Special issue – Community Informatics and Data Literacy Journal of Community Informatics (http://ci-journal.net)

Call for Submission v2 – Important: deadline extended to the 18th of December 2015

A special issue of the international Journal of Community Informatics (http://ci-journal.net) will be devoted to Data Literacy. Community Informatics (CI) is the study and the practice of enabling communities with Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). This special issue will focus on the role of data literacy and its possible applications, such as Data Journalism, Smart Cities, E-Government, Data-Based Services, Data Intermediaries, Data Visualization, Statistics for Data Interpretation and Data Collaboration to empower and enable communities. The issue is expected to be published in June 2016. The Journal of Community Informatics is a focal point for the communication of research of interest to a global network of academics, community informatics practitioners and national and multi-lateral policy makers.

Call for papers

The field of CI seeks to explore the potential of information and communication technologies and their applications for social and economic development efforts at the community level. It particularly seeks to ensure that marginalized individuals and communities can benefit from the opportunities that ICTs can provide. Increasingly, data literacy has been identified as a requirement to make effective use of these opportunities. However, very little attention has been paid to defining what data literacy means, how it can be achieved and which are the impact of its applications.

Data literacy refers to the skills, knowledge and context needed to make effective use of data on the web. It includes the ICT skills to find, access and manipulate data; the statistical and subject matter skills to interpret and use the data; and also the context needed to provide the opportunity and motivation to use the data. It can be seen as a characteristic of an individual or a community. Recently there have been calls for greater data literacy from communities as diverse as the open data movement (who see it as essential if open data is to fulfil its promise of greater transparency and engagement) and the citizen science movement (who see it as required for citizens to understand, engage in, and support science). This raises fundamental concerns in CI such as the power of those who are data literate relative to those who are not, and the right of experts to demand skills of the population as a whole. However, these debates need to be underpinned with a clearer and more detailed description of what data literacy is, why it is needed, and concrete examples of success (and fail) cases. Work on data literacy has remained the domain of educationalists and librarians, but the increased use of data in many areas has created a pressing need for a more multi-disciplinary view.

For this special issue of the Journal on Data Literacy, we are inviting submissions of original, unpublished articles. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

* What do we mean by data literacy?
* Why do we need data literacy?
* How should data literacy be achieved?
* What are the broader political, social and philosophical implications of data literacy?
* What are the practical implications of data literacy?
* What is the role of data intermediaries or facilitators? Is Data literacy for everybody, or will we always have the need for intermediaries between the creators/providers of the data and the consumers in order to provide insight on the context and meaning of the data?
* Using Data Literacy for:

We welcome research articles, along with case studies and notes from the field. All research articles will be double blind peer-reviewed. Insights and analytical perspectives from practitioners and policy makers in the form of notes from the field or case studies are also encouraged – these will be reviewed by the editors.

Closing date for submission of full papers: 30 September 2015 18th December 2015

If a critical mass of the dominant free providers were to do this, would it deter consumers from using ad blocking or merely piss them off and lead them to go elsewhere? From Boing Boing:

The company says it’s not policy to do this — yet — but they’re testing locking Yahoo Mail users out of their accounts unless they turn off ad-blocking.

Many (many, many!) Yahoo Mail users actually paid for their Yahoo Mail accounts, in the form of a bundle with their cable or DSL subscriptions. Presumably you can get around this by just using a mail-client to pull your Yahoo Mail over POP or IMAP (the last time I checked, you could use Gmail to read your Yahoo Mail this way).